Sunday 18 January 2004 09.59 EST
First published on Sunday 18 January 2004 09.59 EST

Music is a pure, maybe even a holy art; musicians, sadly, are human creatures, admirable though not always very likeable. What follows is the story of a disillusionment.

William Christie - the prodigiously gifted American harpsichordist, conductor, musicologist and teacher - has rewritten musical history during recent decades, reviving the work of French baroque composers such as Charpentier, Lully and Rameau and performing them throughout the world with Les Arts Florissants, the ensemble he founded in 1979. He is based in France, though we might have kept him for ourselves if the immigration rules had been more lenient. Christie came to London after graduating from both Harvard and Yale, and began to work with colleagues such as Christopher Hogwood who were starting to play Handel and Mozart on period instruments.

Then one day - shopped, perhaps, by an envious colleague - he was hustled out of a recording session because he lacked a work permit. France took him in, and has generously subsidised him ever since; he became a French citizen in 1995, and nowadays seems estranged from the United States. During an Arts Florissants tour just after the Iraq war, he gave a bravely unpatriotic interview to the New York Times in which he described the gang of rapacious ruffians who now run the American government as 'evil'.

In his adopted country, they adore him. A recent book by a French critic pays reverent homage to what it calls l'église Christique - the Church according to Christie not Christ. I didn't imagine, when I set off to meet him in Paris, that I was going to encounter a redeemer or saviour. I'd have been grateful, however, for a little milky human kindness.

I had been warned about him, once by someone who used a four-letter word. Conductors, who spend too much time with sticks in their mitts, are petty tyrants; Christie is a stickler for punctuality. So I knocked on the door of his dressing room at the Paris Opéra - where he was conducting Les Indes Galantes, Rameau's erotic romp about tropical love - exactly at the agreed hour. Hearing a gruff order from within, I opened the door. Christie, involved in a leisurely confab with some other visitors, trained his small, cold eyes on me and said, with an inflection that registered amazement at my effrontery: 'Are you early?' I pointed out that I was right on time. 'You'd better wait outside,' he said. His weary sigh made it clear why detractors nickname his ensemble Les Arts Languissants.

I waited for 20 minutes, patiently reminding myself of the performances that had made me want to write an article commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Les Arts Flo (which coincides with Christie's sixtieth birthday). Just as I was about to stomp off in a huff, a winsome soprano from the evening's opera came along and entrusted me with a fragile, beribboned cake box: a gift for the conductor. That evening was the last performance of the run, and she obviously wanted a return engagement. Christie's guests left soon after; without a word of apology or welcome, he suffered my intrusion. 'Somebody loves you,' I said as I gave him the tributary cake. Thin, haughty, witheringly elegant, he frosted me with a glance. Not even a pair of discarded socks in a corner of the dressing room managed to humanise him.

He positioned himself on a stiff, straight-backed chair, aimed those refrigerating eyes at a point somewhere above my head, and told me about the formation of Les Arts Flo. 'I had a country house in the Vendée at the time, a marvellous old seventeenth-century place, and I went down there with a group of young singers and instrumentalists I'd befriended. We rehearsed twice a day, and had wonderfully long lunches and dinners. It all continued happily until on the fifth or sixth day there was a knock on the door late at night. Two gendarmes wanted to check our identity cards; they'd come to case the joint I suppose, because people nearby had reported hearing strange chants coming from the house as we performed our traditional cantiques , and imagined we were doing unspeakable things. "Tell me," one of the cops asked, "are you a sect?"'

Christie didn't take the opportunity to proclaim the creation of l'église Christique . Nevertheless - since his performances now sell out to bands of devotees in Paris, London, New York and everywhere else - he has acquired a cult following.

In the beginning, there were fights with the avant-garde guardians of taste. Christie enjoys waspishly mocking the stringent modernism of Pierre Boulez, but, as he told me, he also dislikes 'the people in the French musical establishment who think that this classicising thing they have in architecture and the visual arts can be applied to music. When I was first in France, I did meet a milieu that I found fairly disgusting. We were allowed to give concerts of early music, but it could only be by candlelight in the Sainte Chapelle or at Versailles. Once we were invited to perform at a grand house, and when I asked the hostess where we were to play she pointed to a large folding coromandel screen and said " Derrière le paravent " - behind the screen! I felt like a harpist in the dining room of a resort hotel. And then there would always be the moment when the organiser said, "Could you please put a wig on?"' He shuddered.

Despite his chilly fury, he had, I reminded him, worn a Louis XIV wig when conducting Charpentier's incidental music for Molière's Le Malade Imaginaire at the Chtelet a few years ago. 'Yes,' he loftily conceded. 'I suppose I did. But it was done with great art!' Lady Bracknell could not have bettered his delivery of the line.

Nowadays no one asks Christie to skulk behind the furniture. The French, being cultural chauvinists, are grateful for his resurrection of their neglected or forgotten composers. 'I gave a demonstration lecture on Rameau last night at the Collège de France,' he said. 'It is,' he added rather unnecessarily, 'a very august body.' Yet to his annoyance, the government also periodically calls on him to revive the 'ancient régime'. 'I don't believe in the past,' he snapped. 'I am of my age.'

All the same, Charpentier and Rameau were mellifluous apologists for monarchical power, and in 1982 Christie was invited to the theatre in the palace at Versailles to entertain the politicians gathered for a G7 summit. He performed Charpentier's Les Arts Florissants - the courtly masquerade praising the monarchy, after which he named his own ensemble (and he will present it again at the Barbican's anniversary concert on Tuesday).

'Thatcher cancelled because of the Falklands war. Reagan was there, and slept through it all. Two French gorillas took me to be presented; he woke up and mumbled, "Mercy, mercy," which he thought was French for thank you. His creepy wife said, "Oh Ronnie, he's American, he's the director of the Operetta here." But later I was introduced to Helmut Schmidt and his wife. She astonished me by asking if we'd tuned to 415 or 440 - she knew all about baroque pitch, and we had a delicious conversation! With Pierre Trudeau, I could continue in the same vein. I warmed to their immense culture, and felt ashamed of my own country.'

I asked whether it did any good to play music for men like the 'bullies' whom he excoriates in the current American administration. 'None at all,' Christie replied, revealing the pessimism that perhaps explains his bad temper. 'We are totally powerless. Music is like aspirin, it offers partial and temporary relief.'

I wondered if this nihilism might also account for his advocacy of Rameau, whose operas - with their clashes of tragedy and comedy, and their warfare between vicious gods and rebellious men - contain such chaos. Christie listened to my question and then, like a tetchy schoolmaster, said: 'Define chaos.'

To his consternation I did, mentioning Greek cosmology, the lay-out of Paradise Lost and contemporary chaos theory with its flapping butterflies and ebullient tornadoes; I even casually threw in a reference to Rameau's dance of the elements as they separate themselves from the primal, chaotic murk in the near-atonal prelude to his opera Zaïs. Christie's eyes, which until then had been hovering in mid-air like police helicopters, at last condescended to notice me, and he kept me under close scrutiny for the rest of our talk. 'Thank you,' he said with a flickering semblance of a smile as I left, 'for the beautiful questions.' Having been brought up to be polite, I thanked him for his beautiful answers.

Later that evening, during curtain calls after Les Indes Galantes, he did a disco routine on stage as the chorus gave an inevitable reprise of the song in which the American natives pass the peace-pipe.

Watching him angularly boogie, I caught a glimpse of the Christie who - despite his musicological purism - adores Aretha Franklin and Ella Fitzgerald, thinks of Les Arts Flo as a contemporary equivalent to Duke Ellington's swing band, and acclaims the jazzy liberties taken by the soprano Renée Fleming in the performances of Handel's Alcina they gave in Paris a while ago. Unfortunately, this was not the man I met. I wish him a happy birthday, with very many happy returns for Les Arts Flo. But I also wish that Christie were more of a Christian.